Panel Title: Blue Hawthorne: Alluvium, Riparian, Fluvial, Oceanic

The annual conference of the American Literature Association will take place at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, IL on May 23-26, 2024. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society seeks proposals for the panel below. Please send abstracts of 250 words to Ariel Silver ariel.silver@gmail.com by Jan. 17.

The Hawthorne Society invites proposals that engage with the emerging field of Blue Humanities and consider the place of Hawthorne in a “poetics of planetary waters,” as suggested by Steve Mentz in his Introduction to the Blue Humanities. How might Hawthorne, working in Salem, Concord, Lenox, the Berkshires, Liverpool, and Florence, be approached from a water-centric perspective? What saltwater and freshwater geographies does his work bring to the surface, from the trans-Atlantic coast to Walden Pond to the Concord, Kennebec, Arno, and Jordan Rivers? At what scale does Hawthorne engage with aquatic experience, from tide pools to ponds, rivers, and oceans? How does his blue writing engage with the ecological crises of our own times?